Playing with film photography, I wanted to explore the balance between figuration and abstraction. With film photography, I don’t love the idea of digitally editing them once they’re developed as I think part of the charm of the medium is the surprises that arise, so I played around with different setting and lightings at home to see what effects could be created of the same subject matter.
The first image I liked because of the muted tones, image composition and feeling of muted foreground with one flower in focus. The other two images I liked because they are not obviously flowers. There are visual hints of stems, leaves orange and yellow but they are very difficult to distinguish and I think this tension between representation and abstraction is interesting.
I have researched the following artists as they combine painting and print and I would like to better understand their perspective on the relationship.
Urs Fischer
As “contemporary art’s leading rebel without a cause” works such as his “Problem Paintings” subvert photographs and Hollywood portraits by printing fruits and foods over their faces. “The funny thing is fruits are more universal than movie stars,” he says and he uses food because “It’s just things that are alive. The great thing about fruit is that it’s basically a mother built around a seed. It’s a disposable mother that’s given with every seed and it builds the nourishing ground around it and decomposes and gives all the essential stuff to this little seed to become something.”. He references art historical scenes such as nudes and still lifes, using humour to subvert and create images that are not representational or abstract, painting or photograph.
Blurring the line between process and product, Roth embraced accidents, mutation, and mutability in his finished works.”
“German Cities” consists of a collection of black and white postcards of German landscapes. He reproduced the image in a grid format, overlaying a translucent colour to define the outline of the monument in different positions. Here the paint seems to serve as a veil. It forces the viewer to recognise the shape of the monument and yet the image behind does not quite fit, like an ill fitting puzzle piece. He manipulates what the viewer can and can’t see, playing with perception.
“Now there’s painting on one side and photography—that is, the picture as such—on the other. Photography has almost no reality; it is almost 100 percent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture. . . . I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good—better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”
Richter separates art from art history, focusing on the image rather than the allegorical. In his over painted photographs, he explores the dialogue between old and new media. He combines photographic print with abstract materiality and the emotionality of paint. He obscures and reveals images that he’s photographed with paint.
“Together, the overpainted photographs attest to the infinite variations in perception that exist from one person to another, and from one moment to the next—a reality that photography denies through its mechanical process, but one that Richter reintroduces with his applications of paint. Thus, in the overpainted photographs, two oppositional aspects of his process—a narrowing-in on the specific and an embrace of ambiguity—are united.”
His chromogenic prints are also something I would like to explore.
She has photographed and collected post cards of ancient trees. Here, she has painted white gouache around the tree in order to block out the surrounding area and highlight the form. The photography almost feels like research, collection, while the gouache painting seems like an act of care and reverence. Her method is research driven but open to serendipity.
Thomas focuses on the monochromatic painting traditions of East and West. His worked is characterised by monochrome, reflective surface, simplicity of form and a shifting sense of temporality. His use of such tools seems to be a comment on the relativity of perspective.
““I am drawn to the monochrome by its visual energy and its emptiness. I like its deceptive simplicity. A pure monochrome exists only as an idea, not as a physical reality. An actual monochrome is seen in relationship to something else, a background, a wall, or another color. Other things impact on it and it on other things as an intervention. The monochrome if used in certain ways can help us see and consider the world around it more attentively. I use it as a temporal device, as an interval in the world.”
Thinking about what is said by painting on a picture .
In my tutorial with Clare, we talked about how different constructs of size, surface and border can affect our reading of an image. Framing constructs can create distance and formality while bleed print can stimulate a sense of being involved. Talking about how a framed image can feel like a window into another world reminded me of the traditional Dutch paintings. When paint is then placed onto the surface it changes our interaction with the image, the illusion of distance is broken and the surface level is highlighted. By interacting with the surface, there is an oscillation between foreground and background, a co-location of image.We discussed gesture over image and whether the two had a particular relationship or whether the picture was just a surface to be acted on. We talked about how diptychs and triptychs traditionally denote time, different spaces being explored and how there is a shift in meaning when things are perceived together.
In the past I have played with combining paint and photography, exploring how an impulsive mark can relate to memory and a photograph. Over the break I had taken a lot of pictures of the sea and some of them were overexposed. As a test, I tried making marks associated with different feelings of the sea onto the less successful photographs, combining photography and mark making. I played with the curation of these by pairing them with photographs that had not been drawn onto and placing them in a line almost like camera film. Different curations evoked different narratives. Placed next to one another there was a sense of comparison and equation, that the two equaled a feeling/location. In a line there was more of a story, a sense of time and unfolding, a linear narrative. I also tried placing them vertically however the result felt stilted and more like individual pieces. It felt more appropriate to place them horizontally, evoking a sense of “landscape”, the sea and “reading” a horizon. The prints were the traditional photograph size which meant there was a history of the photograph actively bought into the visual.
I also tried painting different marks on photos of clouds. Here the curation did not seem as integral to the narrative or the success of the image. I was not as focused on quickly representing the feeling of clouds as I don’t really know what they feel like. These marks seemed somehow more sophisticated and confident, perhaps in part because they were acrylic paint rather than pastel, I knew that the mark could not be rubbed and changed as effectively and was therefore more decisive.
When I think about this in relation to past projects, it is about combining the idea of learnt and primal, the agency of human touch on things, about the different perspectives of memory. Evoking a sense of the subjectivity of memory, that we all bring a personal lens of understanding to a photograph that is seemingly objective, rendering it subjective. In some of the images, the marks I made interacted with the photograph and in others it blocked the image entirely. Where the image was covered more, using a database of memory was required to make sense of the image.
Clare and I discussed the following artists which I would like to explore further: Gerhard Richter, Tacita Dean, Paul Caldwell, David Thomas and James Turrell.
The curator suggests that if Rembrandt had been alive today he may have been a cinematographer. Each room was lit in a different way by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky depending on the paintings and the stories behind them. Whilst in the exhibition, I considered the role of light in the narrative of an image. How does it set a mood and pace? Suschitzky talks about how some of his more successful lighting in films has been when only some areas are visible by light, that it is more intriguing and invites the viewer to fill in the picture – this relates to what I’ve read of Ramachandran and the artful brain. He talks of how part of the appeal in Rembrandt’s work is that the sitters look like they’re lit from within, the light is internal to the painting, unlike Caravaggio who lights his scenes from one direction, outside the frame. For Rembrandt, light isolates the figures against a dark background and serves as a sort of internal spotlight.
Rembrandt as a theatrical story teller, encouraged his students to act out a scene before painting it. This highlights an emotional engagement and the importance of bringing an experienced memory to an image. When connected to an art work, it can become charged with a particular energy. How does this relate to painting today? His obsession with light feels relevant to my current practice as I start to explore film photography – how can lighting change a mood and guide the viewers eye?
Leo Villareal @ Pace Gallery
(Quotes taken from exhibition handout)
As an abstract artist, Villareal uses LED lights and software to create visual experiences. “The works in this exhibition exist at the vanguard of digital technology while drawing on a history of practices engaged with mass imagery, mechanical reproduction, and the materiality of light”. The screens are windows into the artists rule based software. Although digital, the work emulates organic behaviours and looks like constellations and fireworks.
His works can be both standalone and part of a curatorial machine/constellation. His use of triptych references the historical, renaissance altarpieces but “takes on new meaning in contemporary digital age, in which screens proliferate around us in increasingly immersive configurations”.
He explores the artistic capacities of technology and “by embracing a technology with reduced visual complexity, Villareal emphasizes the actual binary unit of each light- emitting diode, rioting the works in the materiality of mechanical production”. He plays with light patterns by altering the frequency and intensity of the light emitted. In a way, his work demonstrates a contemporary use of chiaroscuro.
Although the concept behind the works is engaging and the use of technology feels poignant within the current digital age, looking at the works without reading about them they did not feel hugely impactful for me. Perhaps that’s because I prioritise the analogue and feel we are so inundated with screens and technology on a daily basis that I don’t want to look at screens within a gallery space unless it really creates a mood or an interesting visual.
Reflection
I went to both exhibitions in the same day and it was interesting to compare two such different artists from such different times. Both artists are exploring the capacities of light in art with technologies available in their times. Their use of light is completely different and has completely different results. One is narrative, cinematic, story telling and the other uses light as a vessel for concept. I’m not sure exactly how the explorations of light I saw will feed into my project but it feels more relevant since I have been looking at film photography and it was interesting to see different ways of using light in an image with the figurative and abstract, digital and analogue, traditional and contemporary.
AFor Christmas I asked for a film camera and as I have enjoyed taking photos on my phone for a while and having worked with photographs in the ‘artefact’ project, wanted to play further with combining photographs, negatives and Paint. I’ve been interested in combining photographs and painting for a while and wanted to experiment with film, something that can’t be observed immediately and carries its own quirks as a medium.
I started playing with taking pictures and was open to making as many mistakes as possible in order to see what unconventional effects could be created. I found that I’d over exposed many which I thought might be interesting but actually just looked washed out.
It’s interesting to see what you’re drawn to taking pictures of. On reflection, the images I seem to be drawn to have animation or marks of animation. Either nature charged with energy or marks of human trace. I think the latter is what interested me in the pictures I took of the unmade bed as well as the contrast of light and shadow.
Of the bed images, to me, the following image is most successful because it looks almost like smoke. It not necessarily immediately obvious that it is a bed and is therefore a more intriguing image.
I’ve been trying to work out exactly where my project is going and how to visually articulate what I am primarily exploring. Our learnt and primal responses are always a fundamental interest to me and are inherently linked to human perception, however both subjects are so broad they leave me with an intimidating scope. Time away from the project has felt invaluable in terms of giving me space to let things percolate and rise to the surface. On reflection, although I explored many different mediums, I think I was letting the idea of painting with glass constrict my ability to move forward with the project. My feedback from stage one included letting the object speak for itself and becoming less allegorical and within that I became fixated with materiality to a point of it weighing me down.
Thinking over past projects such as ‘artefact’, in the final critique, it was not actually the memory veils that people wanted to focus on but the Riso prints with gestural paint that were more engaged with. For me, this combination embodies the notion of the learnt and primal and allows me to consider perception from the perspective of memory and photograph. I will therefore move forward with ‘realise’ exploring how gestural marks and photography contribute to our perception and memory.
One of my fundamental interests is our primal and learnt responses to things. My project primarily focuses on human perception, looking at how nature and nurture shape the way we see things. Our perception is inherently connected to memory. We bring to an image or object our database of experience in order to pattern match and make sense of things.
I play with image distortion through layering and attempt to evoke perceptual problem solving, referencing the work of neuroscientist
Ramachandran.
As a material, glass often takes on the visual properties of the surrounding context, but is also often used to alter perception – glasses, screens, camera lenses, microscopes, reflections.
I was looking forward to creating a statement of intent as I felt it would help me reflect on my project so far and clarify how to progress.
In response we to the worksheet, I decided to create a verbal mind map, responding to the questions.
In order to help me review and reflect, I also decided to create a visual mind map, laying out images of my work so far in terms of how I felt they related to one another. This helped me visualise more clearly what topics arose in my work so that I could highlight those which I’d like to move forward with.
Within this project I tried to move away from being too allegorical in order to facilitate a deeper engagement with the material and matter. This was very much out of my comfort zone and left me in a bit of a hinter land. I felt like I’d spent the first two weeks focusing on applications and so only really began to absorb myself in the “investigation” in the last few weeks. As a result I felt like I was playing catch up a bit.
I was interested to hear everyone’s feedback however I felt very exposed since I still didn’t have clarity about the direction of my project. I always start working fairly intuitively and after my feedback from stage one, tried not to pin my project down by over conceptualising. For this project however, perhaps I left it too open for interpretation without enough foundation in concept. I’m still working out how to find a balance between letting the work breath and speak for itself whilst being rooted in a concept. Perhaps I could consider the concept a seed for growth rather than a framework to work within. I think I also need to be more selective about which conceptual elements I focus on rather than trying to allude to too much and packing too much in. I think I will try to achieve this by standing back and reviewing my work, working out what leitmotifs arise and then focusing on the ones I think are most important/relevant.
The silent crits were an interesting way to see how the work was perceived. No one talked about the teapot with film or the works with fabric, a few people wanted to talk about the painting with tape but the majority wanted to discuss the works with glass. It’s always interesting to see what people are drawn to but this could also be because I laid these pieces in the foreground.
Although I had been asking people in the studio for feedback throughout the project, the silent crits confirmed for me that people reference their understanding of the world in order to make sense of an image. Nothing works in isolation and the context of an object or thing changes our perspective on it. When the glass was placed on an image related to water, the glass seemed to take on these properties and people referred to it as being like the surface of water or ice. When it was placed among trees, it was described as the light through the trees. This made me reflect further on the properties of glass. Here the pieces of glass both distorted the image and took on the properties of the environments in which they were placed. It made me think of how linked to perception glass is as a material. It is used to facilitate observation e.g. windows, mirrors etc. And to distort/clarify e.g. glasses, camera’s, microscopes etc.
I found the feedback from the crits very useful however I was still left feeling confused and needed to let the information percolate. My main take aways were observing people’s perception and that I needed to critically reflect on my project in order to clarify what it was about. I feel that so far I have not applied enough of my critical agency to this project.
I had liked how the black and white prints had adapted when I put glass on the so I revisited the cloth and lighter prints.
Since the print on the cloth had not been visible, I wondered how they would look if I drew into them like the memory veils from my past project. I tried using a white pen on the organza in order to create images of clouds. However, the organza was very delicate and in places started to tear. This made me think of the object, the material and the broken glass. I started to actively manipulate and “destroy” the cloth with my hands and pen.
I thought the result was interesting, especially since I had been looking at “broken” things such as the shattered glass. As with the glass, I tried applying the cloth over the neutral coloured print. As expected, the finish was very different to the glass and created a different atmosphere. The finish felt more cloud like where the glass had looked like water reflection.
OSJ Wells Fine Art 